1. Technical Field
The subject matter disclosed herein relates to a system and method for exploring new sponsored search listings and other pay-for-performance advertisement of uncertain quality.
2. Description of the Related Art
Sponsored search is a large and rapidly growing advertising platform and a major source of revenue generated over the Internet by search engine companies. With a high volume of Internet searches performed every day, search results web pages may represent a commercially-viable advertising medium allowing advertisers to achieve complex advertising goals (e.g., build brand awareness, attract specific customers, target segmented markets, generate web traffic, implement behavioral targeting, etc.).
Typically, although not necessarily, sponsored search advertising may involve a publisher or advertisement provider, such as, for example, a search engine Yahoo! Search™, running an auction among multiple advertisers to sell an advertising inventory or space on its search results web pages returned to a user in response to one or more search terms (e.g., a query). To participate in these auctions, advertisers may select one or more keywords that are descriptive of or otherwise related to their businesses, and may submit bids on each of such keywords to have their advertisement, or listing, shown next to the search results when a user's query matches a particular keyword.
As used herein, a “publisher” may be defined as an entity having a revenue model based at least in part on selling advertising inventory or advertising space associated with sponsored search results web pages to advertisers. Some non-limiting examples of publishers may include, for instance, Yahoo!, Google, and Ask. Advertising inventory may include, for example, spaces that are reserved for advertisements on a publisher's sponsored search results web page. As used herein, an “advertiser” may comprise an entity that desires to place a listing on a publisher's sponsored search results web pages.
A publisher may select advertisements and their relative placement (e.g., their positions or slots relative to other advertisements) on a search results web page based on certain pricing rules and/or transaction mechanisms. Such mechanisms may include, for example, a cost-per-click (CPC) pricing in which an advertiser may pay a publisher every time a search engine user clicks on a displayed advertisement from the advertiser. Another example is a cost-per-impression (CPM) pricing that may allow a publisher to charge an advertiser according to the number of times (e.g., a thousand, etc.) its advertisement is shown to search engine users (e.g., for a chance to be viewed by and/or to make an impression on potential customers). Optionally or alternatively, a publisher may charge an advertiser conditioned on whether the displaying of a particular advertisement leads to some desired event or action by a search engine user on the advertiser's web site (e.g., sale of an advertised product, participation in surveys or sweepstakes, etc.) in accordance with a cost-per-action (CPA) pricing, for example. From the publisher perspective, the objective under any of these pricing mechanisms is to maximize the expected revenue per impression, given the strategic nature of advertisers' bids, while providing a reasonable advertisers' return for a given advertising budget (e.g., the number of clicks, impressions, purchases, etc. per daily or weekly cost incurred). In addition, for some advertisers, one-dimensional bids (e.g., restricted to bidding on only one feature, such as, CPC, or CPM, or CPA, etc.), for example, may not be sufficiently expressive to convey their valuations or preferences.
Revenue from sponsored search advertising may drive much of the innovation that occurs in Internet technology in general and search engine services in particular. Accordingly, as Internet commerce evolves, it may be desirable to develop one or more methods, systems, and/or apparatuses that implement efficient pricing and/or transaction mechanisms which may improve the overall efficiency of the auction market (e.g., by reducing or eliminating strategic bidding behavior, etc.) while increasing publishers' revenue and/or optimizing advertisers' return on investments.